People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The
evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring:
In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death.
And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you
get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage,
you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being
on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed. Being on the right side of the argument could let you kill your hated rival!

When we study sage grouse or elephant seals in their natural habitat, we can be fairly sure that they are striving to maximize their long-term reproductive success. But it is much more difficult to make the same claim for human beings. People strive for something, certainly, but it is usually money or power or security or happiness. The fact that they do not translate these into babies is raised as evidence against the whole evolutionary approach to human affairs. But the claim of evolutionists is not that these measures of success are today the tickets to reproductive success but that they once were. Indeed, to a surprising extent they still are. Successful men remarry more frequently and more widely than unsuccessful ones, and even with contraception preventing this from being turned into reproductive success, rich people still have as many or more babies as poor people.

It is contended that the desire to expand wealth in the face of scarcity
underlies the evolution of rules, including moral norms. People
"rationalize" their behavior as moral by adopting beliefs which reduce
the costs (psychic or tangible) of achieving their objectives.

Public-choice scholars have long argued that voting is instrumentally irrational because the probability that a single vote will change the outcome of an elec- tion is nearly zero. Dennis Mueller made the point well when he noted that “the probability of being run over by a car going to or returning from the polls is sim- ilar to the probability of casting the decisive vote. If being run over is worse than hav- ing one’s preferred candidate lose, then this potential cost of voting alone would exceed the potential gain” (1989, 350).

Civics teachers talk as if politics is about policy, that politics is our system for choosing policies to deal with common problems. But as Tyler Cowen suggests, real politics seems to be more about who will be our leaders, and what coalitions will rise or fall in status as a result. Election media coverage focuses on characterizing the candidates themselves – their personalities, styles, friends, beliefs, etc. You might say this is because character is a cheap clue to the policies candidates would adopt, but I don’t buy it.

The obvious interpretation seems more believable – as with high school class presidents, we care about policies mainly as clues to candidate character and affiliations. And to the extent we consider policies not tied to particular candidates, we mainly care about how policies will effect which kinds of people will be respected how much.

If the people never avail themselves of the opportunity to overturn
what was done initially without their consent, they may thereby reveal
only that people who have been fed thin gruel for a long time get used
to eating it and even come to consider it nutritious. In less metaphorical terms, my claim is that ideological change is
often path-dependent: where a dominant ideology stands and where it is
most likely to go in the future depend significantly on where it has
been in the past.

Bearing in mind this aspect of political, social, and economic
dynamics, we may come to understand better how, for example, in each
decisive episode in the great transformation of America's political
economy between 1900 and 1950, "first it happened and then they
consented," and afterward the people looked back on these episodes not
so much with regret as with pride and a sense that the nation had
overcome great challenges.

This picture of the voter was largely corroborated in the behaviouralist revolution, when sociologists and political scientists began asking people questions about politics. To their dismay, they found that the typical voter is not the ideal citizen of classical democratic theory, but largely ignorant about matters political. A majority of voters have little knowledge about policy issues, lack a coherent ideology and are unable to distinguish between party programmes (Berelson et al.. 1954/1956: ch. 14; Campbell et al, 1960: chs 8–10; Converse, 1964).

Power does not flow from the person who administers orders. A command is inconsequential, it's ignored, or laughed at. Obedience is the real foundation of misplaced power. It is in fact the chain of obedience - not the chain of command - the cumulative force of cowardly, and compliant citizenry which allow some men to take control.

Special interest politics is a simple game. A hundred people sit in a
circle, each with his pocket full of pennies. A politician walks around
the outside of the circle, taking a penny from each person. No one
minds; who cares about a penny? When he has gotten all the way around
the circle, the politician throws fifty cents down in front of one
person, who is overjoyed at the unexpected windfall. The process is
repeated, ending with a different person. After a hundred rounds
everyone is a hundred cents poorer, fifty cents richer, and happy.

New studies show existence and positive purpose biases. First, we presume that what exists is better than what is not. ... Second, we presume the universe is designed to achieve broad positive purposes. ...For social institutions, these biases combine into a perfect storm: we assume our social institutions are well designed to achieve laudable broad purposes, rather than being more accidental arrangements where we each achieve private purposes holding constant others’ behavior.